Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba
Thanks for sharing these! I can also attest to witnessing you hustle for items fast :) I especially like your point 1
Hard to give a general answer, but I think 2x someone's normal salary (especially if it's cash) is usually quite sufficient to get the job done, and kind of reliably has helped me in the past when I've try to find people happy to work night shifts
I was setting up a retreat venue, and they were pretty weird and special beds -- such that if they would've actually worked, it would've pivoted our strategy for setting up the space in a somewhat major way.
You mean money or social capital?
I think it depends on scale. If Ford produces cars in batches of 100(? 1000? more?) they probably can't rejigger the factory. In this case it was a local ironworker who probably had 10 or fewer guys working his shop, so a bit more flexibility.
Yes, show up uninvited. That happens a lot in our slack. Our team is small enough that most people read most channels.
Can confirm Lightcone is very chaotic and sometimes works heroic hours, and it seems tangled up in our way of working for reasons that are not super clear to me.
So when reading your comment I was asking myself why the above template couldn't be run by a project that wanted to work closer to 40 hours rather than 80 hours per week? One answer is that "Well, if people are importantly blocking elements, they must be available to reply on slack and unblock other people whenever", which is mostly true for us, except that 1) we almost never wake up people who are sleeping :) and 2) if people sign-post they are taking a rest day or going on vacation others usually try fairly hard to find a way to solve problems without contacting them.
For what it's worth I don't consider this essay to be about "ops" that much. Also lots of people keep calling much of what Lightcone does "ops", but we often really don't think of ourselves as doing ops that much :) Some words that sound to me more like the thing I think of Lightcone as doing, most of the time: "uncertainty reduction", "product discovery", "trying to doing things fast".
The majority of tasks we do don't involve any memos. We write them occasionally when 1) thinking through some big, hard-to-reverse decision, 2) when setting goals for 2-week sprints, and 3) if someone wants to call an all-hands meeting, we usually require them to write a memo first (which is a nice rate-limit on how many all-hands meetings you get).
I think the rate of memos written is maybe 0.5 per person per month, on average, but counting it is a bit messy.